What happens when even the mother trees disappear?

West Africa’s coast used to be thickly forested, with rainforests hugging beaches and mangroves. Marching far inland, the forests were home to an astonishing diversity of trees and forest creatures, ranging from dozens of monkey species and chimpanzees to okapi and elephants. The many communities that called the forest home practiced various forms of shifting cultivation, barely impacting one of the world’s most important biodiversity hotspots. Then came colonial forestry and its focus on single species block plantations, and later still the cocoa gold rush.

The forests started declining.
The process moved into high gear with the post-WWII agricultural revolution. Farmers loved the convenience and power of inorganic fertilisers and pesticides. With those almost miraculous inputs, cocoa thrived despite the absence of the shade it evolved with – and produced more pods. There was money to be made, and farmers rapidly switched their cocoa over to full sun systems.

The forests’ decline accelerated.
Regulatory issues did not help. In both Ghana and Côte d’Ivoire, regulators discriminated between regenerated and planted trees, with the former belonging to the forestry department rathe than the farmer. For a farmer, the safest way of ensuring a tree would be seen as one’s own was to plant an exotic – and remove any indigenous seedlings or saplings from the cocoa field.

By the early decades of this century, the forest was almost entirely gone – and with it, the rains and forest foods like bush mango, petit cola and edible caterpillars.
Growing cocoa became increasingly difficult. Soils, exhausted from the overuse of fertiliser and the absence of organic inputs, favoured new diseases like CSSV, Cocoa Swollen Shoot Virus, which killed millions of trees. The old way of growing cocoa, under the shade of forest trees, would take care of many of those problems.

But by now, most indigenous shade trees have disappeared. Formerly common species like Cola lorougnonis, Aubregrinia taiensis and dozens of others had the sorry distinction of making it to the IUCN red list. Nursery owners now have to travel hundreds of kilometres to find one of the few remaining mother trees, driving those species towards inbreeding depression, a vicious circle whose end point is extinction.

But my colleagues are on the case. Working with local forestry organisations and Botanic Gardens International, they are scouring the remaining patches of forest for mother trees, and helping nursery managers grow, market and sell genetically diverse ranges of threatened species.

But ultimately, it’s the global cocoa market that decides if agroforestry will expand its species diversity or not.

When prices drop, seedlings go unplanted.

CIFOR-ICRAF’s Chief of Partnerships, Cathy Wilson’s excellent report will give you a vivid impression of what the stakes are. To read the full report click here